Finding my place: Navigating feminism as a woman of color
Illustration by Yana Samoylova, Staff Illustrator
Feminist: a champion of women’s rights and equality for all. That was a label I always wore proudly on my youthful sleeve. But as I got older, the word — feminist — changed. And for a moment, I had no place in the empowerment movement.
Western feminism is all I’ve ever known. The non-universal version of feminism where I longed to become a woman, just like the blue-eyed blonde princesses on my TV. But my stubborn brown skin and eyes never lightened under the sun.
No matter how much I wished.
Women of color must change themselves to be perceived as members of feminism in America. Feminism has always had challenges with representation. It was always the idea, "We’ll work to get white women paid, and in the long run, you might get a bonus!”
I have found myself being put into a box of what I could and couldn’t believe. And a lot of those ‘cant's’ coincided with me defending my Indian heritage.
I can’t support the idea of an arranged marriage. By Western definition, arranged marriages are women getting forced to marry. To me, it was just how my parents met.
Arranged marriages have surrounded me, and it never seemed bad. That was until people started to make a point of bringing it up in conversation.
“But you hate arranged marriages, right?” or “Arranged marriages are wrong; that’s what feminists believe.”
I don’t hate arranged marriages. I wouldn’t be here without them.
Feminists believe in equality for all. Does ‘all’ not mean my mother, grandmothers, aunts and cousins? Where did those powerful and willful women fit in feminism?
It was clear they had no space for them in the West.
In Rafia Zakaria's book “Against White Feminism,” she describes a white feminist as “someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played and continue to play in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas, and beliefs as being those of all feminism and all feminists."
I was in middle school when I first realized the concept of white feminism. The first time someone I knew told me “to go back to my country.” Silence during conflict is something I inherited from my mother; humiliation strips our voices.
My peers — who would consider themselves feminists — at my diminishment. They didn’t care to fight my fight for me like I had seen them do for others. And the only difference between those ‘others’ and me was our skin color.
It's always a tough pill to swallow, knowing that there is no space for you or your opinions because of your race or culture: it always has been. Yet, this felt the hardest to swallow. So I didn’t. I laughed alongside them and assimilated and became what they wanted me to be. A jester for them to ridicule.
It took me until my sophomore year at Chapman University, when I took a gender and women’s studies class, when I regained confidence in what felt like a fleeting social movement. And suddenly, feminism was more than the middle school girls living in my memories.
It was intersectionality; it was how we had social security numbers; it was “Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth. Feminism had flaws. But it also had a lot of beauty, like any human.
And I’ll make mistakes and find myself assimilating because it’s easier than arguing. Not because I am a jester or because I am Indian, but because I recognize the difficulties in my own self. That I am far from perfect.
But perfection is not what makes up feminism; it is the imperfections that stick out like a sore thumb begging for attention. Well, at least for me. And as for my feminism, I strive to live in the world's imperfections, figuring out life with my own immature, flawed, but splendid feminism.
